The Projection Booth podcast covers Point Blank

I’m a little late to this, but back in November 2021, Mike White of Cashiers du Cinemart magazine covered Point Blank on the Projection Booth podcast with guests Jedidiah Ayres and friend of the site Andrew Nette. Mike and I go back to before this site existed (which as a lot of you know, is […]

Added to the cover gallery: A Brazilian edition of The Hunter

Publisher unknown (Brazil) (????) (English: Point Blank)

Translation of cover text:  Top: “Special Mystery Edition” / Subtitle: “The barbarous vengeance of a betrayed and robbed man!”

This Brazilian cover is courtesy of reader Cesar. Over the coming days, I’ll be rolling out a number of Portuguese-language covers that he clued me in to.

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The Violent World of Mack Bolan

Reader Matt points out that the Executioner has been plundering Parker-related book titles recently…

I have plundered these images from MackBolan.com.

Gold Eagle, the division of Harlequin that published men’s adventure books including The Executioner/Mack Bolan, is being closed down after Harlequin’s acquisition by HarperCollins. I expect Mack will land on […]

Parker Scores: Point Blank, The Man with the Getaway Face, Slayground, and The Outfit

NB: A Version of this post also appears at Existential Ennui.

This, I fear, will be my final Violent World of Parker/Existential Ennui cross-post of 2013. The year is fast disappearing on me, and I can’t in all honesty see myself returning to Donald E. Westlake or Richard […]

Movie review: Parker

Update: My opinion isn’t the only one. I’m adding links to thoughts from fellow Parker fans (often quite different from mine) at the bottom of the post.

Parker is terrible.

Almost everything about it is awful. It opens well enough, with a heist set at the Ohio State Fair, […]

UK first editions of the Parker novels (plus some reprints), 1967–1970

NB: A version of this post also appears on Existential Ennui.

Last week I posted a Westlake Score—a 1969 Hodder Fawcett/Coronet paperback of Donald “Richard Stark” Westlake’s Parker novel The Sour Lemon Score—which, for me, completed a run of British first editions of the Parkers—i.e. those editions Coronet published in the […]

Point Blank by Richard Stark: double-signed edition

NB: A version of this post also appears on Existential Ennui.

Later in the week I’ll have another Westlake Score-and-review for you, this one even more exciting than last week’s (well, to me, anyway). But before we get to that, and since I’ve been blogging about signed editions over on Existential […]

Like having a scorpion in the room: an interview with Darwyn Cooke on Richard Stark’s Parker: The Score

Introduction

Darwyn Cooke does one in-depth interview for each volume in his series of comic book adaptations of Richard Stark’s [pseudonym of Donald Westlake] Parker novels. (Here are the interviews for The Hunter and The Outfit.) For his new one, The Score, he was kind enough to invite The Violent World of Parker to conduct the interview. “I thought it was time I geared whatever big interview I did more towards Don’s [Donald Westlake’s] fans, rather than my own,” he told us.

For better or worse, he got what he asked for. Nick and I managed two conference calls with Darwyn across three countries, three time zones, and two continents.

There are minor spoilers sprinkled throughout, but nothing, I think, that will affect the enjoyment of the reader of either Darwyn’s great adaptation or its source material. (I did remove one major spoiler, although not for this book.)

Thank you for sitting down with us, Darwyn, and thank you for your immense contributions to the violent world of Parker, and to The Violent World of Parker.

Dear reader: Dig in. I think you’ll find it as fascinating as Nick and I did.

Interview

Nick: [Opening after some green room chatter] Speaking of The Score: How was it this time? How did you find it? How did you adapt to it this time out?

Darwyn: There’s sort of a built-in need to find a way to make each one better than the last. That usually adds to stress and anxiety and all sorts of things you can’t control, but the more I work with Parker, the more comfortable it gets. It’s a pretty easy ride now.

I know how I feel about the character and I know how people have reacted to it, so I feel really free just to go ahead with it? And, in every case with Parker I’m just out to please myself. And that happens to be pleasing other people, so that’s great.

I’m never sitting there worrying about what it is I’m doing. It’s just a very comfortable, really gratifying job now.

We’re like old buddies.

Continue reading Like having a scorpion in the room: an interview with Darwyn Cooke on Richard Stark’s Parker: The Score

Books which begat films on Existential Ennui

Just a quick plug for a series of posts over on Existential Ennui—one of which Trent kindly linked in his “News for week ending”—on books which begat perhaps more famous films, some of which may be of interest to Violent World of Parker regulars. I cross-posted one of the earliest missives—on […]

Richard Stark’s Parker novels: the US Fawcett Gold Medal and UK Hodder Fawcett Coronet paperback editions, 1967-9

Earlier in the week, at the end of this post on the review slip in Jeffrey Goodman’s copy of the 1967 Gold Medal edition of Point Blank!, I mentioned that seeing that review slip helped me make a connection that answered a question I’d been pondering for a while, and that as a […]